THE REDACTOR SCHOLARS

on textual revision and the development of the Old Testament

BY ESTELLE HOOPER

8.5” x 10.5” (closed) 17 “ x 21” (open), mixed media (sermon notes, Bible pages, thread, metalic paint)

The documentary hypothesis is one of many theories proposed by Biblical scholars (namely Julius Wellhausen) to explain the composition of the Torah, or the first five books of the Bible. It is hypothesized that there were four independent sources from Jahwist (J), Elohist (E), Deuteronomistic (D), and Priestly (P) scholars and was split up and rearranged by a group of redactor scholars to form the Torah.

I was interested in the emotional and physical editing process of the theorized redactor scholars, isolating the J, E, D, and P sources. I used a mould and deckle to form the base of the page, blending paper scraps, pages of the Bible, and my old sermon notes to symbolize past ideas. I then tore the hypothesized J, E, D, and P passages from a Bible and layered them in the paper.

Each page represents the aforementioned sources in order and was burned and stitched together to represent the revision process: the decisions to amend and replace.